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There’s no question that Apple Inc. has enjoyed an amazing amount of success lately. Between the iTunes store, Macbook line, iPods, iPhones and now iPads, it seems like everything the company touches turns to gold.
But there’s been one area of our electronic lives that Apple has struggled to understand. While millions of users login to services like Facebook and Picasa every time they access the internet, most people have never heard of Apple’s web offering: MobileMe.
“You might ask, why should I believe them?” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said at the recent World Wide Developer’s Conference (WWDC). “They’re the ones that brought me MobileMe.”
Jobs then confessed, “It wasn’t our finest hour.”
For a little under a hundred dollars a year, Apple’s MobileMe gave users their own @me.com email address, online storage and a way to sync information across multiple devices.
But critics were upset about the cost and effort attached to the service. Many of the services were already offered by other online websites for free, and other services didn’t always perform to user’s expectations.
If you have a Mac, an iPhone and an iPad, for instance, you'll be able to access your content — photos, music, apps, documents, books, email, calendar, and contacts — on any one of those devices. If anything changes on one of the devices, it appears on all of them.
–Steven Sande
So as of last week, Apple discontinued the MobileMe service and replaced it with nine new applications Jobs introduced as iCloud.
“iCloud will synchronize data on a number of your devices,” explained Steven Sande, feature editor of the Unofficial Apple Weblog. “If you have a Mac, an iPhone and an iPad, for instance, you'll be able to access your content — photos, music, apps, documents, books, email, calendar, and contacts — on any one of those devices. If anything changes on one of the devices, it appears on all of them.”
What does this mean exactly?
Well, the days of plugging your iPhone into a PC or Mac every time you want to sync contacts, photos or music will soon be stories our children roll their eyes at. Losing purchased music or applications will also be a nostalgic tale since Apple now allows you to download items you’ve purchased through iTunes whenever you’d like, with no additional charge.
Sande also told us, “There's an upcoming feature (with iOS 5 this fall) for those people like myself who ripped a lot of CDs into iTunes. For $25 a year, iTunes Match will find those songs that you ripped, upgrade them to the best possible quality from a copy in the cloud, and then give you access to them from any of your devices. Very cool, as your music library is essentially backed up at one of Apple's big server farms.”
The idea of course sounds appealing: photos, music, books, applications, contacts, calendars, documents — all backed up and all accessible from any device for free. But the idea does create a questionable future for the expensive home PC and Mac.
“Yesterday's announcement of Apple's iCloud ... is the latest in a series of nails being hammered into the PC coffin,” said Chad Brooks of the Christian Science Monitor. “In fact, some now say the desktop PC is essentially dead — an immobile zombie that's already irrelevant to many consumers and soon will be to businesses, too.” Sande doesn’t see iCloud with the same apocalyptic weight as Brooks, but agrees that things will change and definitely views that as a good thing. “It's not going to be revolutionary, but iCloud will definitely make having the same content available on a group of devices a lot easier to manage.”
